Jobs-plank
* Dr. Carmine on small businesses that are here, audio, 5.4 megs. * Fire Mayor Murphy. : A long-standing desire was to move Tom Murphy, then mayor, to another job in the private sector. It didn't happen as he served three full terms. ::Mayor Murphy did choose to not run again. ::I wrote a letter to the editor that ran in the City Paper asking for a larger downtown business, such as PNC or Mellon, to hire Tom Murphy and give him a reason to depart before his term expired. ::I was even hoping to settle for another public sector job for Tom Murphy, such as ambassador to Ireland. I asked Candidate John Kerry to make an announcement that he'd hire Tom Murphy for a cabnet job should he have won the 2004 Presidential election. That statement from Kerry would have earned many votes for Kerry so as to rid Murphy from the region. :* Letter to the editor by Mark Rauterkus published in Pittsburgh's City Paper called, Would You Hire This Man Cut jobs by cutting city council seats. * Voters should be asked to consider a reduction in the size of city council. City council has nine members, each with a district. Other solutions have been raised. Those options should be put to the voters. ::A short lived Drive for Five campaign was waged several years ago. Someone ran for office and wanted to reduce city county council to five seats. This would save money. This would also hurt democracy and might hurt the minority community the most. Hence, the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer might come to pass. That would be something I'd work against. ::In other instances ballot measures were put forth, some with the help of the retired firefighters PAC, and the GOP City Committee, lead by Bob Hillen. None of these made it onto the ballot. When Jim Roddey was running for County Executive, the county GOP party did NOT want to see a ballot measure that would have reduced city council seats. Their thinking was that the question would have met with strong opposition from the city's Democrats and would help to turn out a larger vote on election day, hurting Roddey's chances. Save money but cutting city council and mayor salaries. * In some other cities, the mayor's job and that of the city council are non-paid positions. In Pittsburgh, the school board members are not paid. We should be willing to knock down the pay of both city council and the mayor by 50-percent or to zero while the city is operating under Act 47 control. The city council and the mayor has rolled over and given away their rights and duties to oversight board. Hence, they do nothing so they should be paid nothing. Provisions should be sunset and voted upon by referendum. * Should a pay raise benefit me, without a vote of the people, I pledge to not accept the pay increase. I can live comfortably on the current salary. More Jobs: * Jobs are a big deal, but, why is it that in 2006 the the most recent statisticds on jobs in Pittsburgh comes from 2001? We need to think again about statistics, data and job knowledge. I do not think that government is a good way to create jobs in the private sector. However, I feel that government should have a handle on counting the jobs that are here or not. As a member of , I will work with our tax collectors, our controllers, our resources at all branches of government and departments, as well as our institutional researchers, journalist and urban scholars in the academic realm to insure that we get honest, accurate and insightful infomation out and into the open. : P-G article from January 2006 on job surge quotes upon 2001 data from University of Pittsburgh researcher Christopher Briem. * Pittsburgh's potential rests more upon the concept of premier jobs and not service jobs. High-paying jobs are more concentrated within the city because of its institutions and urban leadership. Average jobs, like those found at a fast-food stand, retail shop and a home decoration service that might hang wall paper in a home are everywhere (in the city and beyond). Typical jobs are not the type of jobs that make the city unique to the rest of the region. When decisions are made, I'll play upon our strengths as a city and region. By all means, we do not need to have elected officials on Grant Street who make the rich get richer. Rather, we need to have elected leaders who know that aspirations, ambitions and capacity of many of the workers in the region are top-flight. People in the city want and expect soar in their professions. Excellent service and uses of technology from governemental departments is expected. Too often, the high energy and high impact workers in the city vote with their feet and skip right over any and all dealing with city council because they can't be bothered with either red-tape and sillyness that Grant Street brings. I'll work as a in serious ways with all of the workers in the city, including those who have high performance jobs, so as to insure governement takes care of governmental duties in more effective ways. Pittsburgh differs from the other day-surge cities because its entire region actually lost population in the last census. But the city lost residents at a much greater rate than the region as a whole -- in fact, Pittsburgh's decline accounted for 98 percent of the region's total population loss. As a consequence, the proportional increase in the city's daytime population probably will grow in the future. With so many suburbanites depending on Pittsburgh for their economic lifeblood, the question constantly arises: Are they paying their fair share for the services they get from the city? The salaries that commuters earn contribute to the payroll taxes that Pittsburgh firms are paying to the financially-strapped city, but such big nonprofit employers as UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh don't have to pay that tax. The city also gets nothing from the suburbanites' real estate taxes. That means the main burden on commuters is the occu Links: * Jobs * Payroll category: Platform_Planks_from_Mark_Rauterkus